Thanks to the fine-toothed-comb reporting of ace crime journalist Bledsoe (Blood Games, 1991, etc.), there's no mistaking for fiction this seemingly incredible tale of sex, greed, and murder. An emergency team responds to a 911 call on a quiet, residential street in Durham, NC. It seems that high school coach Russ Stager was accidentally shot and killed when his wife, Barbara, set off the pistol he kept under his pillow. But a dogged detective's investigation slowly reveals the apple-pie family's accident was really a coldblooded murder for money—and not Barbara's first. Flashing back to her first marriage in another North Carolina county, Bledsoe builds the portrait of a suburban southern perfectionist who, when bored with daily conjugal life, goes shopping for expensive clothes, luxury cars, and extramarital affairs. When the debts mount up, Barbara gets a gun. In the middle of the night, her husband (and father of her two sons), Larry Ford, is shot. The physical evidence doesn't support an accident, but it's an election year, and due to political considerations within the police department, the one suspicious detective and his investigation are given the heave-ho. With over $70,000 in life insurance claims in hand, Barbara moves to Durham with a new lease on the good life. Ten years later, her second husband's ``accidental'' shooting—also in the night and also preceded by mounting debts and adultery—leads to her first-degree murder conviction and death sentence. Bledsoe masterfully weaves together the two murders, their investigations, and Barbara Stager's trial. He even maintains suspense when there's no longer any question of whodunit or why. If this fact-packed tale reads a bit like a TV docudrama—the kind you can't turn off, even though you know the ending—it's probably because it's scheduled to be a four-hour CBS miniseries.
Pub Date: Aug. 8, 1994
ISBN: 0-525-93826-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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